More Anti-Gospel Meeting Gospel: Michael Bayly Responds to Archbishop Cordileone about Marriage Equality

Gay Catholics Giving Witness in the Teachable Moment of Catholicism's Current Crisis: Michael Bayly and Andrew Sullivan

Yesterday, I wrote that the Vatican gay lobby story and the story of British Cardinal O'Brien place the Catholic community in a teachable moment regarding those who are gay and lesbian.  I said,

Same-Sex Unions in Britain and Catholic Response: Testimony of Terry Weldon and Michael Bayly

As this day goes on, it occurs to me it's very important to add an addendum to what I posted earlier today about William Oddie and the Catholic Herald.  And this is to say quite simply that Oddie's stance on marriage equality and the human rights of LGBT persons, or Austen Ivereigh's stance, does not, I suspect, represent where a majority of British Catholics come down on these issues.

The Center Moves Left, but Media Continue to Tack Right: Continued Work for Religious Progressives

A smattering of sources today that pick up on themes discussed previously at Bilgrimage. I’ve noted, for instance, the tendency of the mainstream media to act as if progressive voices are not to be found in faith communities in the U.S. Two outstanding postings on blogs I esteem in the past several days offer more evidence for that thesis—as well as for the apparent resurgence of progressive voices in American churches recently.

At Queering the Church, Terry Weldon points to the results of a recent Pew Research Center poll which shows an increasing number of Americans (57%) supporting gay civil unions. As Terry points out, those supporting civil unions include a significant if discrete bloc of evangelical Christians in the U.S., as well as a robust percentage of American Catholics. Terry reads the support of many U.S. Catholics for same-sex civil unions as “signs of a strengthening and muscle flexing by the left at least among the Catholic laity and clergy outside the establishment.”

Noting Terry Weldon’s posting, Michael Bayly at Wild Reed also finds “the circle of awareness, love, and justice . . . expanding” among lay Catholics, despite the resolute resistance of the Catholic hierarchy to gay human beings and gay human rights. Michael links to a wonderful letter of a Catholic mother posted at Pam’s House Blend blog that had also caught my eye several days ago.

The mother writing this letter supports the Catholic mother in Maine who has been attacked for speaking out against the attempt to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens of Maine. I discussed this story several days ago (see the first link in this posting, above, for details). Writing in support of that Maine Catholic mother, the mother whose letter appears at Pam’s blog calls on Catholic officials who are spending massive amounts of money to undermine gay rights to stop attacking LGBT human beings and their families.

A posting by Anna Hartnell at Alternet this weekend (also cited by Terry Weldon) corroborates the rise of a strengthened progressive voice in American Christianity. Hartnell notes that almost all movements for progressive change in American history have been supported, if not driven, by a critical mass of believers who see their collaboration with secular progressive groups promoting justice as part and parcel of their religious commitment. As she notes, however, the media tend to miss this aspect of the American religious story, both past and present, as they focus more or less exclusively on right-leaning trends in American Christianity.

And that monomaniacal focus, which pulls even the extreme margins of the right-wing fringe into the center and treats them as legitimate political options no matter how destructive they are to our democratic institutions, continues. As Jamison Foser noted at Media Matters recently (also here), mainstream media journalists remain unable to see where the real political center of the nation lies. Even as the center moves leftwards, the media continue to speak of the United States as a “center-right” nation in which the views of right-wing extremists should be treated as more legitimate than those of a solid majority of Americans who prefer progressive policies.

We clearly have work to do, those of us with ties to faith communities in the U.S. who believe that our faith commitment has something to do with struggling for justice with those on the social margins. We with ties to the Catholic church have much work to do, when leading Catholic spokesmen for ruthless gay-bashing initiatives like Mark Mutty of the Maine campaign to remove the right of marriage from gay citizens seek insincerely to depict themselves as compassionate supporters of their gay brothers and sisters, who want to see gay folks thrive while removing the right of marriage from them.

As Right Wing Watch notes yesterday, that bogus argument for insincere compassion is hard to sell, given the consistent stand of the Catholic hierarchy against not only gay marriage but same-sex civil unions—indeed, given the consistent stand of the hierarchy against gay rights, period, anywhere in the world that the battle on behalf of human rights for gay citizens is being fought.

And More Synchronicity: Newman Again--Misappropriating and Misrepresenting the Facts

More fascinating synchronicity: I learn this morning from blogger Terry Weldon at Queering the Church, an outstanding blog I read daily with great interest, that he, too, noticed the thread about Newman at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog yesterday, and he posted a statement about that thread as well. Terry seems to have been writing his posting around the time I was working on mine. I didn't go back to his blog after an early-morning reading of it yesterday, and learned of his statement about Newman only when I saw his comment on my blog this morning.

In his comment on my Newman posting yesterday, Terry states,

One of the key lessons for me is how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history - but not in this case. We need to completely vigilant to prevent this, and to do so we must ensure that we have a good understanding of the real history ourselves.

Terry's posting at Queering the Church about these issues also notes,

This highlights for me yet another theme I have become conscious of: so much of our popular perceptions of church history (where we have any at all) are simply wrong. The hierarchy makes no attempt to correct these misperceptions, instead selectively extracting from 2000 years of history that suits and matches their interpretations of what “must” have been, not of what actually was the case.

Then another nugget: In trying to track down the quotation I was looking for, I found another excellent and useful post on McClory, “A Catholic Understanding of Dissent.” This deals with a keynote address McClory gave to a prayer breakfast, in which he spoke (inter alia) about Bishop Nienstedt, and an extraordinary action he took concerning his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker.

“At that time,” said McClory, “[Nienstedt] had done something newsworthy in relation to a book entitled, Revelation and the Church: Vatican II in the Twenty-First Century. This book had been largely written and edited by his predecessor, Bishop Raymond Lucker,” explained McClory, “and, in it, Bishop Lucker said that there were a lot of things that the Church needs to think about. He listed 37 matters of authoritative Church teaching that have undergone substantial change over time – including the Church’s approach to religious liberty, the Bible, slavery, and the Jews. Bishop Lucker’s book also contained a list of 15 teachings that could change in the future, including clerical celibacy, artificial birth control, intercommunion between Protestants and Catholics, condemnation of homosexual activity, and the ordination of women. When Bishop Nienstedt came in and saw that book he said: ‘Take that off the shelf.’”

I heartily second what Terry Weldon says in these reflections. What's at stake in this discussion is separating truth from falsehood. Terry is correct to note that one of the "key lessons" of the recent discussion about Newman on Michael Bayly's blog is "how easily the rightwing sometimes gets away with misappropriating and misrepresenting the real facts of church history."

And so the need to be vigilant and to push back daily against the falsehoods.

In the discussion of Newman and the sensus fidelium at Wild Reed to which my posting yesterday linked, there are two strands of misappropriation and misrepresentation of the facts. I'd like to label these two strands the lie and the equivocation.

The lie is rather easy to detect and combat. People who say that Newman wrote about Arianism to demonstrate that bishops defended orthodox teaching about christology, while the faithful held unorthodox teaching, turn Newman on his head. They grossly misrepresent what Newman said, and why he wrote about this topic.

As my posting about this issue yesterday noted, it's easy to overturn this lie by a reference to Newman's texts. One wonders why anyone would bother trying to tell this lie about Newman's work when Newman's writings about Arianism and the sensus fidelium are easily accessible and easily understood, and when they so clearly say the opposite of what the lie wishes to maintain.

Newman wrote about the Arian crisis to demonstrate that the pastoral leaders of the church can sometimes be wrong in their doctrinal teaching, and that the lay understanding of the faith--the sensus fidelium--can be correct, and can actually save the church from error when its leaders have departed from what the laity hold as the accurate understanding of faith.

Lies about Newman's theology are easily exposed. The equivocation is harder to detect, and for that reason, is more insidious. It masquerades as something other than what it really is. It tells us it is all about concern for statistical accuracy, for correct interpretation of texts, or for legitimation of many readings of the tradition, when its real goal is to discredit this building block of Newman's theology, the sensus fidelium, in order to defend current magisterial teaching as the only possible option for faithful Catholics.

If the question at hand is, for instance, to understand what we should make of the fact that a huge majority of Catholics in the developed nations reject magisterial teaching on artificial contraception (and teachings on sexual ethics in general, insofar as they are based in a biologistic interpretation of natural law), then those dealing in equivocation will propose that this large majority is illusory. Despite hard empirical evidence for several decades now, which shows that the large majority of lay Catholics in the developed world reject magisterial teaching about artificial contraception, and that the trend is well-established and is not diminishing but increasing, those who equivocate about this topic often argue that statistics are misleading.

Or that what the empirical data are capturing consistently over several decades are sporadic "lapses" of the faithful, as they try contraception now and again and then return to the Catholic fold. Or that, if we do admit this trend exists, it exists only for Western Catholics and it is imperalistic to try to impose the concerns of those Catholics on Catholics in other parts of the world.

Since it is clear that what is happening to official teaching about artificial contraception in contemporary Catholicism so closely parallels what Newman wrote about in his work on the sensus fidelium, another line of attack in the equivocating approach is to suggest that Newman's work on the sensus fidelium is only one strand among many in his thought, and that those who focus on that strand misrepresent Newman's work in its totality.

This approach ignores--it equivocates about--the centrality of the sensus fidelium to Newman's entire body of work. It glosses over and equivocates about how Newman's work on the sensus fidelium has now become canonical within Catholic theology and magisterial teaching itself. The documents of Vatican II repeatedly enshrine the concept of the sensus fidelium in their statements about the nature and role of the church.

The equivocating position about Newman's theology of sensus fidelium stands that concept on its head as starkly as the lie does. This position seeks to subvert the plain meaning of the term sensus fidelium. As the term clearly suggests, sensus fidelium is all about the consensus of the faithful, the shared sense of many of the faithful about various Christian teachings, grounded in the lived experience of faith.

To try to twist the meaning of the phrase sensus fidelium to imply that the term means that the magisterium is always correct in its formulation of doctrine or moral teachings at any point in history is to subvert plain sense in the most machiavellian way possible. It is to take a concept that is all about listening to the laity and to use that concept to defend the magisterium when it ignores the laity's voice.

Terry is right. Somehow, how we teach Christian history and Christian theology has gotten twisted, when people of the lie can promote such obvious lies and equivocations and expect to get away with them. In my view, Terry's anecdote about how Bishop Nienstedt handled Bishop Lucker's book on revelation and the church illustrates how we have come to this point.

Though he was a bishop, Lucker had the courage to admit that the church has changed its mind about a wide range of doctrinal and moral issues in the past. Because he refused to ignore the abundant historical evidence which proves this, Bishop Lucker argued that, having done so in the past, the church can change its mind about doctrinal and moral issues in the present and future.

Bishop Nienstedt's response to his predecessor's work? It was to remove Lucker's book from the shelf. We have been living for some time now through a period in Catholic history in which some of our church leaders and some of our intellectual class think that we can control what people think and believe by simply removing contrary evidence from our bookshelves.

We have been living through a less than stellar moment in church history in which people of the lie have claimed the center of the church, and now want to lie boldly (and subtly) about matters all of us can fairly easily see right in front of us, if we open our eyes and look at what is right before our faces. And so the lie has to be supplemented by orders for us to stop seeing what we see, to stop talking among ourselves, and above all, to stop thinking. The lie has to be supplemented by distorted data and subversion of the plain sense of canonical texts.

Fortunately for those who care about the history of the church as an institution, history suggests that such authoritarian tactics of mind control will work only in the short run. They will not prevail in the long run, because people do keep thinking. And noticing the sharp discrepancies between what the official leaders of the institution teach and what they practice. And refusing to put up with those discrepancies, particularly when doing so requires that they sacrifice their own understanding of what the Christian life is all about.

Meanwhile, we are living through a time when the people most inclined to represent themselves as the only trustworthy purveyors of absolute truth are those most intent on misrepresenting and misappropriating the facts. We're living at a moment in Christian history in which Christians of the right are not only trying to outlaw artificial contraception in many places, but are inventing bogus scientific narratives about contraception which suggest that contraceptives are abortifacients and that they harm not only mothers but also children.

If a teaching is true and compelling, it does not need lies to make it palatable. When it has to rely on lies and equivocations to carry the day, something is clearly wrong with the teaching.

A Reader Responds: Standing Newman on His Head

One of the interesting experiences I sometimes have with this blog is an experience of synchronicity involving several other bloggers who talk about issues that engage the passion of all of us as a group. I've just had one of those synchronistic experiences in a three-way dialogue with two other bloggers. I'd like to relate that now, in one of my "a reader responds" postings.

In response to what I wrote yesterday about Archbishop Burke and his anti-Obama political crusade gussied up in fabulous religious garb, Colleeen Kochivar Baker of Enlightened Catholicism writes,

The whole tenor of some voices is really reminiscent of the reign of Pio NoNo. Hell and damnation from the pulpit, promotion of the personal piety of cloistered nuns, siding with the hugely wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class, and the purposeful promotion of creeping infallibility in the Papacy.

No wonder the big push is on to co opt Cardinal Newman. It's almost mandatory the Church bring him in the exalted fold before people actually read what he wrote. Perhaps he is truly the Saint for our time.

As Colleen was sending that comment to my blog, I was over at Michael Bayly's Wild Reed blog, reading and responding to his recent summary of a 2003 National Catholic Reporter article by Arthur Jones, in which Jones interviewed Richard Sipe. Sipe argues that the stage is set for a new Reformation in the Catholic church, because the sensus fidelium, the faith held by "ordinary" lay folks in our "ordinary" everyday lives, has moved in a direction decisively counter to what the church is teaching at an official level in the area of sexual ethics.

A vast majority of Catholics in the developed nations of the world reject the official Catholic teaching on contraception. Increasing numbers of Catholics also do not accept the church's teaching that homosexual acts are ipso facto unnatural and immoral, gravely sinful no matter when and in what context they occur.

I find the response to Michael's posting about the sensus fidelium fascinating, because several respondents completely turn on its head one of the classic sources affirming the sensus fidelium, the theology of 19th-century Catholic theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman. Newman's work noted that, in the period of controversy in the early church in which the Christian community sought to hammer out an understanding of christology (specifically, an understanding of how humanity and divinity connect in Christ), a large number of bishops held the Arian position that was eventually condemned by the church, while the laity held what eventually became the orthodox christological position.

Though Newman is very clear about this issue--in fact, much of his theology revolves around his reflections on what these historical findings portend for the development of doctrine--two posters responding to Michael's posting want to maintain that Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium is actually about the magisterium's inability to be wrong, ever, and that the magisterium (i.e., the bishops) held the orthodox teaching during the Arian crisis, while the sensus fidelium was unorthodox!

And so I responded to these comments on Michael's blog with the following comment:

Great article, Michael. I'm amazed at how a number of respondents in this thread completely turn Newman on his head, when it comes to the sensus fidelium and the Arian crisis.

As Newman repeatedly and clearly points out, it was the faithful--lay believers--who held onto what became the orthodox definition of Christ's nature, when a majority of bishops (the magisterium, to use Liam's term) were Arianists.

As John J. Burkhard notes in "The Sensus Fidelium" in Gerard Mannion and Lewis Seymour Mudge's (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London: Routledge, 2008), "Newman, for instance, was famous for his claim that during the second phase of the Arian crisis, when many of the bishops accepted Arian compromise formulas for expressing the faith in Christ, the faithful rose to the task of witnessing to Christ's full divinity by refusing to have anything to do with such compromises. Increasingly, then, a doctrine of the role of the faithful as a true source of the church's faith became a part of the Roman Catholic theology of faith" (pp. 561-562).

My God, what are they teaching in these right-wing Catholic colleges nowadays, if they can take Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium and his history of the Arian crisis and try to argue that this theology and that history argue for the perpetual rightness of the magisterium and the wrongness of the laity in matters of faith and morals?

And then I logged into recent comments on this Bilgrimage blog to find that, while I was responding to Michael's posting and discussing Newman's theology of the sensus fidelium, noting that there seems to be a move afoot in some Catholic quarters to turn Newman's theology on its head, Colleen was responding to my posting yesterday by noting that there's a "big push" on to co-opt Newman and to "bring him into the exalted fold" before people actually read his theology.

I call this exchange synchronicity. It's that spark of insight shared by a number of bloggers day by day that keeps me going. It convinces me that many of us who are blogging about these issues are part of a wider community of thought and faith than we often realize, as we sit blogging in our individual locations.

And that's a good thing to recognize, when the odds against our marginal little communities of discourse seem stacked so largely in favor of those who hold the reins of power firmly in their hands.

Questions of Religious Authority in Catholicism Today: Wild Reed and Queering the Church

Finally, today, I want to note discussions on two of my favorite blogs, Wild Reed and Queering the Church, to which I have been meaning to draw attention for some time. These discussions of scripture and tradition, and the role of binding religious teachings and religious authority in establishing the meaning of scripture and tradition within Catholicism, link to discussions of these same issues on Bilgrimage.

I haven’t blogged about these discussions at Wild Reed and Queering the Church, since the thread of interconnecting postings at these two blogs that I want to recommend now began while I was out of the country. Though I contributed to the discussions as much as I was able while I was traveling, my lack of constant access to the internet (and time to think and write) as I traveled prevented me from posting about these discussions.

Now I’d like to do so—to draw attention to both blogs and this interconnecting thread as a treasure trove of information and insights about the role of the magisterium in Catholicism today, and how different believers view that role. The comments sections of these postings contain lively debate, to which I want to draw readers’ notice. It was in some of those sections that I was able to contribute to the discussion while traveling.

The postings I want to recommend are Michael Bayly’s “Catholic Challenge” and “Treasure and Dross” at Wild Reed, and Terry Weldon’s “Magisterium and Me” and “Magisterium and Scripture” at Queering the Church. These postings are treasure troves of information about questions of authoritative teaching in the Catholic church, as well as snapshots for how different groups of Catholics today appropriate and understand religious authority.